The UpTake: So far, customers are responding to venture-backed Conductor's costly expansion into "web presence management." That's software designed to optimize everything your brand puts online that's not an ad.

T o hear some people people tell it, 2014 is the year free social media marketing died.

But Conductor, a venture-backed marketing software firm in New York City's Flatiron District, is making precisely the opposite bet with a goal to " end paid media." Three months after announcing its expansion beyond its roots in search engine optimization, Conductor claims a strong summer of new customers and growth on its "web presence management" software platform.

After CEO Seth Besmertnik founded the company in 2010 as a pure SEO shop, Conductor is now thinking about clients' online reach more broadly. Its new products are designed to track and measure a brand's unpaid marketing efforts across the entire web, spitting back data to inform new efforts in social media channels, original content and search. It's a drastic expansion from plain SEO work, and is at the heart of Besmertnik's belief in unpaid media.

"All the banner ads next to your content on your site, they do get some attention, but they don't get clicked on nearly as much as organic, and that's what we do," Besmertnik said, citing research about how much more frequently customers are acquired through free channels.

While it's a logical expansion from SEO, it does seem like he's tackling an increasingly challenging space. By design and simple math, it's getting harder and harder to stand out on social media channels without buying ads. But Conductor isn't about closed networks like Facebook or any single channel, Besmertnik says, and there will always be a new channel popping up to create new opportunities for organic marketing — and users aren't going to suddenly start to appreciate paid advertising again.

Ben Fischer covers technology, digital startups and venture capital in New York City.

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